What follows is the perfect first guest post for our little project of looking for wisdom, love …and lint.  In his post, Adam Pracht writes about the little pieces and big ideas of love. Adam is a chef  in Chicago and  is working to end violence on the south side of Chicago. With that here’s Adam with his pocket findings…

We’re all taught early on that love exists in specific categories, often based on the Greeks’ different words for love, usually utilizing some combination of affectionate, familial, sensual, and charity. After the categories of love, the next concept we are told to grasp are actions of love. We learn about giving, compassion, sex, serving one another: these are all things we do that are a result of having love for another.

These two contrived concepts –  the categories of love and the actions of love – are accurate enough, they both certainly exist and can easily be pointed out in every day situations; but lately, as I’ve been growing older and encountering more and more varieties love, I feel that these categories and actions only cover a small section of love. In doing so, they limit our ideas of love and, in fact, completely miss some of the more important, beautiful aspects. Aspects of love that, for lack of a better term, I’ll call tiny love. Not because this love has a small impact, but because if you’re not looking as hard as you can (and in fact sometimes it’s only visible in retrospect), you’ll miss it.

This love, or fragments of a concept of love, is becoming a crucial part of my view of love. Tiny love can exist independent of people (and their hearts), of time, even independent of situations themselves.  Here is a short list of my explainable encounters with this untethered, fragmented love:

Washing dishes is arguably the best way to look for little bits of love.

Chasing animals for hours with a 2 year old, shrieking the whole time and never coming close to catching any of them is an easy way to find it.

Working an overnight shift, knowing the sun will be up soon, you realize: you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, doing anything else, even if you could. Your heart gets almost imperceptibly bigger as you watch the first rays of sun filter in.

Whole pieces of tiny love can be found in carefully prepared dishes, especially the ugly ones. Cooking is one of those love languages that categorizing misses, and it’s one of the best.

I’m not even sure love is the right word for any of this. Maybe it’s just a concept, maybe it’s any situation that grows your heart a millimeter bigger.

The really truly exciting thing about the endeavor of Sophia’s Pockets is that they’re asking for everyone’s voice to collaborate with them in making something beautiful. So please, if you have one, share your story of finding some bits of a strange love when you weren’t looking for it, or if you think that love isn’t the right way to describe it, tell us what is.